Thomas Gnielka

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Thomas Gnielka (born 1928 in Berlin ; died in January 1965 in Herold ) was a German journalist whose research a. a. initiated the Auschwitz trials in Germany in the 1960s.

Life

Thomas Gnielka grew up in Berlin. During the Second World War he was drafted as an air force helper and was also deployed with schoolmates from the Spandau Kant high school in the Auschwitz region, where they met emaciated concentration camp prisoners who had been assigned to external detachments for forced labor.

After the war, Gnielka initially worked as a volunteer at the Spandauer Volksblatt and then went to Munich, where he met Ingeborg Euler in 1948 . He set her texts to music, with which she appeared as a young cabaret artist in the Munich cabaret theater "Simpl" with his piano accompaniment . They married in 1949 and had five children between 1950 and 1962. The family, which had grown to seven people, lived in the "Dillenberger Mühle" in the Herold community from 1963.

Euler was invited to the Group 47 meeting in 1949, Gnielka in May 1952 . He read from his novel History of a Class . This is about a group of schoolchildren who were deployed as flak helpers right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of the war.

Gnielka worked as a journalist for the Wiesbadener Kurier and in February 1957 switched to the Frankfurter Rundschau (FR) as local editor for the Wiesbaden region .

After he had published a report in the FR about the conditions in the Wiesbaden pension office, whose employees were reluctant to process the compensation claims of Holocaust survivors and also identified themselves as old Nazis, a former concentration camp inmate from the Auschwitz concentration camp asked him for help with his Request for redress . This gave him parts of one of him at the end of the war from the rubble of the SS and Police Court XV. Breslau retrieved file, which dealt with the bureaucratic handling of 1942 concentration camp prisoners “shot while trying to escape” . On the following day, January 15, 1959, Gnielka sent the eight sheets, which were signed by the camp commandant Rudolf Höß , to the Hessian attorney general Fritz Bauer , to whom the Federal Court of Justice then transferred the investigations into crimes in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was the initiation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial made possible.

Gnielka belonged to September 1960, the editors of the FR that he then worked freelance for the FR and wrote for the metal newspaper of IG Metall , the magazine Quick and the newspaper world view. As a political correspondent, he primarily dealt with the personal continuity of National Socialism in the associations, parties and authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany. Gnielka engaged in investigative journalism and went in search of the missing concentration camp commandant Richard Baer . After finding Baer's sister-in-law in Hamburg, he voiced the suspicion in a report in a German magazine that Baer was leading the life of an honest man under a false name. Baer was arrested in Sachsenwald shortly after the publication . Before and during the Auschwitz Trial, which began on December 20, 1963, Gnielka quartered trial witnesses in his mill in Herold.

He did not live to see the verdict of the first trial on August 19, 1965. He had been suffering from skin cancer since 1963 and died in 1965. Heinrich Böll gave the funeral speech in Herold . Gnielka was also friends with the painter Otto Ritschl . “Rebel against indolence” was the title of the obituary in the FR of January 8, 1965.

Movie

The prehistory of the Auschwitz Trial was filmed in 2013 in the film Im Labyrinth des Schweigens by Giulio Ricciarelli . Actor André Szymanski took on the role of Thomas Gnielka .

Fonts (selection)

  • Kerstin Gnielka, Werner Renz (ed.): As a child soldier in Auschwitz. The story of a class . Novel fragment and documentation. With an afterword by Norbert Frei . Hamburg: European Publishing House 2014
  • Gambling wrong with the past. Right-wing organizations in our time . Frankfurter Rundschau publishing house, Frankfurt am Main, 1960
  • Thomas Gnielka: The SS state in person. Interview with Fritz Bauer , in: Weltbild, January 13, 1961, pp. 2–4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Claudia Michels: Eine Frankfurter Heldengeschichte , Frankfurter Rundschau , October 12, 2013, p. 24f
  2. ↑ Claudia Michels: The shooting lists were on the buffet , Frankfurter Rundschau, March 27, 2004
  3. ↑ a b c Insa Wilke: War instead of nursery . Review, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 3, 2014, p. 14
  4. ↑ Elisabeth von Thadden : It turns your stomach . Review, in: Die Zeit , February 12, 2015
  5. ↑ Monika Melchert: "Mother Berlin" and her daughters , in: Ursula Heukenkamp (Ed.): Unterm Notdach: Post-War Literature in Berlin 1945-1949 . Schmidt, Berlin 1996 ISBN 3-503-03736-5 , p. 373
  6. ^ A b c d Gisela Hoffmann: A versatile artist from Rangsdorf: Ingeborg Euler , in: Allgemeine Anzeiger für Rangsdorf, Groß Machnow and Klein Kienitz, August 9, 2007
  7. ↑ Literary life. Database on literary life in the German-speaking countries 1945-2000 , at the University of Göttingen
  8. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute : The Auschwitz Trial: tapes, protocols, documents . 2nd, revised and improved edition. Directmedia Publishing, Berlin 2005. Facsimile, sheet 73, attachment volume 1a
  9. ↑ Labyrinth of Lies in the Internet Movie Database (English)
personal data
SURNAME Gnielka, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 1965
Place of death Herald